


Five Things You Do Not Know About Dick Grayson

by thewhitestag



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman and Robin (Comics), DCU - Comicverse
Genre: M/M, N Things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-05
Updated: 2012-10-05
Packaged: 2017-11-15 16:56:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/529495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewhitestag/pseuds/thewhitestag
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But they won't be secrets forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Things You Do Not Know About Dick Grayson

**♜ O N E**

He buys an extra blanket and pillows while out shopping for his new place. He stuffs them amongst the other bed dressings in his shopping cart, punching down the mass of fluff with the phrase  _‘just in case’_  repeating in his mind. At his loft, they sit stacked on a living room barstool, where they remain mostly untouched for six months.

This is, of course, the period when you are having trouble with your father. The clash comes as a bit of a surprise to everyone, but Dick Grayson had anticipated it, had prepared for it, at least more so than yourself. It is a difficult time, some of the most tumultuous moments of your life. But even at your most miserable moments, you never think to follow him to downtown Gotham after a night patrolling together.

Why would you? He’d been the one to leave you after all. And after each collaboration together, each brief reunion with this man who was your brother-father-mentor, he watches you make your way alone, returning to the unhappy manor on the other side of the bay. When he gets back to his own loft in the city, he unlatches the window lock and hopes; it’s his way of apologizing, even if he shouldn’t, even if you’ll never hear this particular ‘I’m sorry.'

Later, when you are fourteen, he asks you to help him clean his apartment. You find these bedthings stuffed in the back of his closet, strangely separated from his other extra linens, and wonder if he has a companion. Some new roommate or romantic entanglement that he is concealing from you. He only laughs when you question him. There is nothing like that.  _Not yet_. But sooner than either of you realize, it’s a secret that you’ll be sharing together.

  
  
  


**♚ T W O**

His showiness comes out tenfold when you’re around. As an inveterate circus-brat he’s always using his acrobatics, but there’s an extra flourish to each pirouettes if he thinks you might be watching. A perfectly curved leg that makes his revolutions appear faster, a pointed toe that accentuates the lines of his body. When he’s stepping in for your father, he can make the cape swirl just so. But it’s the worst when he’s stupid-cheerful Nightwing, hair fluttering with impossible precision.

It brings you a unique kind of annoyance, the way this man seems to treat the mission so playfully. You think he’s like a child, only understanding danger as a faint concept, something distant and mystical, which cannot be distinguished from fiction. But he’s not a child. And he’s been hurt so many times already.

Worst of all, he keeps getting hurt. And he keeps smiling, keeps spinning, keeps flying. Utterly maddening. He’ll always push just enough to get you cursing and red in the face.

Dick Grayson loves to make you angry. But that part is something you  _do_  know.

  
  
  


**♟ T H R E E**

He has the remnants of an old break in his left arm. A faint density on the distal radius; what a physician would recognize as a typical Colles’ fracture. Of course, his body shows a multitude of other such marks inside and out. But this one is peculiar. It is the only major scar he acquired before falling beneath the shadow of the Bat.

It was June. Hot and muggy, dust sticking to sweaty skin. While the older folks busied themselves raising the tent for the weekend show, he had climbed up on top of the cat cages to try a surprise ambush on one Yelena Smolski. She was three years older than him, and a crucial part of her parents’ knife-throwing act. Haly had hired the family a few lots back when the circus was touring through southern Indiana.

The Smolskis had immigrated from the Soviet republic of Byelorussia, smuggling themselves out through a Finnish port just days after Yelena had been born—but this is something that Dick Grayson was not aware of. All he knew at the time was that Yelena smelled like strawberries, and that when she smiled at him with her adorable, almost-perfect teeth, his brain grew stupid and his body felt strong. A dangerous, but intoxicating combination.

From above, he could see her straw-colored curls, fast approaching. She would be passing by within seconds. He had little by way of a plan once he’d caught her attention, because what more could a seven-year-old boy want. And after all, when more experienced lovers kiss, or hold hands, or touch one another, aren’t these all just ways of saying the very same things— _you have my attention, I see you, you exist in my world_.

Unfortunately, Dick Grayson’s lack of foresight also did not account for loose planks. The boy was thrown off balance, an entirely foreign sensation to the young acrobat, causing him to freeze in shock as he tumbled off the edge of the tiger cage. For a moment it was as though he were truly flying, arms outstretched and airborne, almost magical if not for the looming presence of reality. Fortune’s wheel had spun him a neat one-eighty and he was taking a vertical dive to the dirt.

The second his palm slammed into the ground, he began screaming. It felt as though someone had hammered an iron spike straight through his wrist, splitting the muscles and bones. He could hear the roustabouts shuffling to surround him, their rough voices barking, faces peering, recognizing, and then disappearing in a trail of dust as they went to call his mother and father.

It was the worst pain he had ever felt in his seven years of life. But he didn’t cry until Yelena patted his hair reassuringly, murmuring, “You’ll be okay, little boy.”

He is no longer a little boy by the time you meet him, and so there are many stories like this. Stories that come before you, have nothing to do with you, stories that have the liberty to ignore your entire existence in relation to the man. But he’ll still force you to listen to them anyway.

  
  
  


**♞ F O U R**

He likes the look of you when you’re all elbows. It happens too often that you get trapped in your own shirt, mid-way through pulling it over your head.

He thinks you’re graceful. You would disagree;  _he’s_  the one that’s graceful. Efficient is the word you would choose for yourself. But the way you move when you fight, your sharpness, your precision, he doesn’t think there’s a better way to describe it.

On the other hand, when you’re stuck, curses muffled by the fabric in your face, flush blooming all the way down to your exposed stomach, it can’t be called graceful, not even by the most poetic or ironic of interpretations. Yet Dick Grayson still thinks it’s beautiful.

He likes the look of you when you’re all elbows, utterly failing to undress yourself properly, and thereby requiring his intervention. Especially when it’s one of his shirts.

  
  
  


**♛ F I V E**

He doesn’t know if his parents would have approved of your father. In fact, he suspects that they would have hated him. Your father’s closed personality, his sharp-edged morality, so diametrically opposed to their own temperaments. And then there is the matter of the mission. The danger. It wouldn’t be entirely hypocritical for them to be angry about that; flying without a safety net might be tempting death, but fighting crime is to leap willingly into its arms.

He has poked holes in the barriers, tried to to carry pieces back and forth between these two periods of his life. The colors and designs of his costumes are one of these such ventures. Then there are his special gravity-defying kinetics, a connection which had been apprehended by a young Timothy Drake. And then of course there is his playful banter, his utter need to perform with every action, though it is clear that his rhetoric is nowhere as nimble as his body. In fact, his humor has never improved despite the decades of practice, and you suspect he makes it particularly awful when you’re patrolling together.

John and Mary Grayson; Bruce Wayne. They are not so much different people as different worlds. Past and present made discontinuous, repelling one another as if by intrinsic nature, water and oil, or ions of a similar charge. Though he holds your father close in his heart, Dick Grayson knows it is perhaps for the best that his parents will remain unacquainted with him.

But  _you_.

He really wishes they could have met you.

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this after a long absence from writing, so the prose gets pretty clunky at times. But it was a good exercise; everyone needs to play with second-person every now and then. It's such an indulgent mode.


End file.
